The Political Chase

Newsweek Hammers Bush

Newsweek’s  article "How Bush Blew It", published today, gives the Bush administration the appearance of a high school junior varsity football team, without a coach, playing the first game of the season.

1. The President was totally disengaged for days, if not still, even after his initial fly-over as he returned from vacation.
2. Bush’s lieutenants are woefully afraid of delivering bad news, which thereby causes considerable delays when seconds literally means the difference between life and death for thousands.
3. Regardless of whether Mayor Nagin can be blamed for any historical neglect, he was the only one that truly rose to the occasion, demanded that bureuacracy and political agendas be put aside and literally pounded the President’s desk screaming for help.
4. Rumsfeld was making the decisions on sending in troops, not the President.  For the most part, Rumsfeld would not engage and/or delayed federal troops, sent too few at varying points, and was unable to accomplish the tasks that Wal-Mart could - sending in a caravan of trucks with supplies.

I found several passages to be quite striking.  I’ll list them below and you can form your own opinion.

• "On Tuesday, some 24 hours after Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, [the President]  decided to return to Washington and hold a meeting of his top advisers on the following day, Wednesday. This would give them a day to get back from their vacations and their staffs to work up some ideas about what to do ." [Emphasis added]

• "’Rummy’ opposed sending in active-duty troops as cops."

• "Though it seems abstract at a time of such suffering, high-minded considerations about the balance of power between state and federal government were clearly at play.  It’s also possible that after at least four years of more or less constant crisis, Bush and his team are numb. "

• "At dusk [after the hurricane passed], on the ninth floor of city hall, the mayor and the city council had their first encounter with the federal government.  A man in a blue FEMA windbreaker arrived to brief them on his helicopter flyover of the city.  [He had] a sense of urgency.  ‘Water as far as the eye can see,’ he said.  It was worse than Hurricanes Andrew in 1992 and Camille in 1969.  ‘I need to call Washington,’  he said.  When he finally got someone on the line, the city officials kept hearing him say, "You don’t understand, you don’t understand.’ "  [Emphasis added].

Apparently the unidentified FEMA employee’s call to Washington at dusk  did not produce results; maybe not even a return call - Newseek does not provide an accounting.

• Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco knew that she needed help. But she wasn’t quite sure what. At about 8 p.m., she spoke to Bush. "Mr. President," she said, "we need your help. We need everything you’ve got." 

•  "There are a number of steps Bush could have taken, short of a full-scale federal takeover, like ordering the military to take over the pitiful and (by now) largely broken emergency communications system throughout the region. But the president, who was in San Diego preparing to give a speech the next day on the war in Iraq, went to bed."  [Emphasis added].

• "To his senior advisers, living in the insular presidential bubble, the mere act of lopping off a couple of presidential vacation days counts as a major event. "  [Emphasis added.]

• "Within a day [after the hurricane], only 28 or 30 officers would be left to save the stranded and fight the looters."

• Early Wednesday morning, Blanco tried to call Bush. She was transferred around the White House for a while until she ended up on the phone with Fran Townsend, the president’s Homeland Security adviser, who tried to reassure her but did not have many specifics. Hours later, Blanco called back and insisted on speaking to the president. When he came on the line, the governor recalled, "I just asked him for help, ‘whatever you have’."

For the man that rages war in Iraq, and is responsible for sending in troops with inadequate armor, I find the next passage to be beyond disbelief.

"Rumsfeld’s aides [said] the secretary of Defense was leery of sending in 19-year-old soldiers trained to shoot people in combat to play policemen in an American city, and he believed that National Guardsmen trained as MPs were on the way."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently described the President as, "Oblivious, in denial, dangerous."   Her statements brought outrage from Republicans.  Maybe Pelosi was basing her statements on items similar to this passage. 

"For most of those first few days, Bush was hearing what a good job the Feds were doing.  Bush likes "metrics," numbers to measure performance, so the bureaucrats gave him reassuring statistics.  At a press availability on Wednesday, Bush duly rattled them off.  Yet it was obvious to anyone watching TV that New Orleans had turned into a Third World hellhole." 

Repeatedly, the President said publicly from the onset, "We’re doing everything we possibly can."  But, that seems to come with a prerequisite.  You must have a computer and Internet access.

 "Rep. Bobby Jindal, whose district encompasses New Orleans, told of a sheriff who had called FEMA for assistance. According to Jindal, the sheriff was told to e-mail his request, ‘and the guy was sitting in a district underwater and with no electricity.’"

Rep. Jindal gave the above tale directly to the President on Friday aboard Air Force One.   The President received several other similar tales from local and state officials in the same meeting.

"[T]he president just shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing."

Hello, is anybody home?  It’s Friday, and the entire world has long since known the severity of the situation in New Orleans.  Was the President busy writing speeches about Iraq all week or just in bed, even after visiting the region earlier in the week?  Can someone suggest a good opthamologist in the DC area so that maybe the President can get some proper  glasses and watch one 6:30 PM (ET) news broadcast from ABC, CBS, or NBC?

To my earlier statement about Mayor Nagin’s justifiable persistence and outspokeness:

"A debate over "federalizing" the National Guard had been rattling in Washington for the previous three days."

"The meeting [Friday on Air Force One] came to a head when Mayor Nagin blew up during a fraught discussion of ‘who’s in charge?’  Nagin slammed his hand down on the table and told Bush, ‘We just need to cut through this and do what it takes to have a more-controlled command structure. If that means federalizing it, let’s do it.’ "

It is unconscionable that the mayor of a city, with a population of approximately one million people, has to pound his fists and embolden himself to the most powerful person on terra firma to get him out of his chair  to do something about the worst natural disaster in the history of this country.

I close with this excerpt:

" Late last week, Bush was, by some accounts, down and angry. But another Bush aide described the atmosphere inside the White House as "strangely surreal and almost detached."

That  sounds more like the ending of a movie you’ve just seen and the directors are already filming the sequel.